September 2013

September 09, 2013

Today I realized how much activity on this blog has been
dependent on my having a few hours a week (when I’m waiting for my five year
old to finish a class) when I’m out of the house, in a fairly noisy room, with nothing
to do, no chores, no books, no radio, no Internet, just a laptop. This post had been drafted almost completely but
I never got around to writing the last few sentences. “August movies,” unfortunately, currently
exists only as a list of titles.

July was surprisingly busy and a light month for movie
watching, but no duds: Ruby Sparks, Django Unchained, and The Flower Drum Song.

Ruby Sparks is an enjoyable, lightweight, thoughtfully romantic
indie flick, if you don’t think too much about it. It was written by Zoë Kazan, Elia Kazan’s
granddaughter, who also stars in the title role. Paul Dano plays a neurotic, uptight, poorly
barbered (and artistically blocked) former novelistic Wunderkind who—on the advice of his therapist (Elliott
Gould)—decides to write a bad piece, for no one else’s eyes, of one page only
in length, about someone who actually likes him and his dog. He incorporates bits of recurring dreams he’s
been having, and eventually has the beginnings of a new novel. Also, he believes he’s falling in love with
his imaginary creation. Then he begins
finding bits of girlish paraphernalia around the house: pastel-colored razors,
primary-colored lingerie. He has no
explanation for how it got there, since he’s been living like a monk with his
typewriter and his dog for years. Then
he finds the girl herself, and she won’t take “no” for an answer. She insists that she’s his girlfriend and
that she’s been living in his house for some time. And she’s just as perfect as he’d imagined
her to be. She shows him how to have
fun; she’s the kind of girl who, at a club, might take her panties off and then
dance while holding them in her teeth.

It’s hard to know how seriously to take all this. It’s dark, then it’s lighthearted, and then
it’s incredibly dark again. Stranger than Fiction (where Will
Ferrell discovers that what he thought were hallucinations are really
intimations that a novelist, played by Emma Thompson, who lives in the same
meatspace world as himself, really actually is determining the course of his
life) played with the dark aspects of this kind of story a little more
successfully by emphasizing the humor. Ruby Sparks isn’t sure what kind of
woman its subject is, any more than it’s certain whether its protagonist is a
schizophrenic, an abuser, or a good-hearted romantic dreamer. There are extremely heavy-handed allusions
made to the idea of the “Manic Pixie Dream Girl” and her irreality, and to
other questions of gender in fictional and reality, and to the relationship
between fiction and reality, more generally.
But these are abstract, and while the film reinforces those well-known commonplaces
about wrong ways (for men) to write about women, this undermines the film itself.

Ruby Sparks is
interested, apparently, in what it would mean for a writer to be creating a
real person, rather than in what it would mean for the object of the
fiction. There are some wickedly sharp
scenes about the public life of a famous writer, especially those involving a
novelist friend, played by an equally floppy-haired but more smoothly groomed
Steve Coogan. There are some nice
interchanges about what used to be called “the war between the sexes,” between
Calvin and his brother Harry (Chris Messina), a pumped up macho yuppie
type. And there’s a rare, hilarious comic
turn by Antonio Banderas. I suspect there’s
an interesting idea buried in the premise of this movie, and (unless this is
the kind of thing you hate) it’s probably worth watching.

Django Unchained: I know a lot of people don’t like Quentin
Tarantino, because his movies are so violent, and you don’t have to look too
far below the surface to see that this one has questionable racial
politics. But personally, Tarantino is
one of the few filmmakers—the only other director I can think of who falls into
this category for me is Woody Allen –whom I trust enough to see his films as
art even if I don’t entirely enjoy them at first and even if there are parts of
them that don’t make sense. I assume
that Django Unchained plays with the
conventions of both Westerns and present-day action movies, but I’ve seen
almost none of either, so I can’t consider it in connection with hose. And it’s probably unwise to look for a
“message” in a movie like this one. It’s
postmodern, but does postmodernism mean playing with old conventions without
intending their further implications, or does postmodernism mean conveying
those implications in order to make some comment on them? (A topic for someone wondering what to do for
her Ph.D. dissertation.) There’s some
amusing use of 1970s-era music (who would have expected Jim Croce in a Tarantino
film? I don’t think I’ve heard a Croce song
in twenty years), the acting is good, the story is engrossing and never (unless
you’re bothered by violence) alienating.

Flower Drum Song: This movie is on cable a lot. I finally got a chance to watch most of it,
but missed the beginning, with the most famous songs, “One Hundred Million
Miracles” and “I Enjoy Being a Girl.” It’s
pretty typical Rodgers and Hammerstein material, about the clash between the
values of recent Chinese immigrants and brash America, but it could as easily
be about the clash between the traditional Broadway musical and the 1960s. The choreography is a good example of the
modern style of the late 1950s, but Jerome Robbins it ain’t. “Love, Look Away” is a beautiful song, . . . and
it’s entirely out of place, both in terms of plot and transition, and in terms
of the set. In a more operatic show,
sung as it is, it could work. It doesn’t
work in a one-room apartment, it doesn’t work on a fire escape with the kind of
smoke effects and backlighting that would work, a couple of years later, in Mary Poppins, and the transition from
what seemed to be a fire escape to what turns out to be a roof doesn’t work at
all. Then there’s the ballet, one of the
traditional elements of the R&H musical.
The ballet is a shiny Technicolor dreamwork with choreography that’s all
over the map in terms of dance styles, and I couldn’t take my eyes off it—the
set is reminiscent of nothing so much as the desert planet set on Star Trek (TOS). The plot is not just corny but unbelievable
to the point of being offensive—not to Chinese people, but to the audience. There are two male-female pairs, just like in
Guys and Dolls (Jack Soo has the
Frank Sinatra role)—an older, sophisticated couple in which the female partner
is a showgirl, and a younger couple where the woman is naïve and idealistic
(here, the man is a law student raised in New York City and the woman is a very
young, very recent immigrant played by Miyoshi Umeki)—and all the stereotyped
war-of-the-sexes tropes are trotted out to show why they haven’t got a chance,
but they get married anyway.